Unrest and civil war

Beginning in March 2011, Assad faced a significant challenge to his rule when antigovernment protests broke out in Syria, inspired by a wave of pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. (See Arab Spring.) While Syrian security forces used lethal force against demonstrators, Assad offered a variety of concessions, first shuffling his cabinet and then announcing that he would seek to abolish Syria’s emergency law and its Supreme State Security Court, both of which were used to suppress political opposition. However, implementation of those reforms coincided with a significant escalation of violence against protesters, drawing international condemnation for Assad and his government.

As unrest spread to new areas of the country, the government deployed tanks and troops to several cities that had become centres of protest. Amid reports of massacres and indiscriminate violence by security forces, Assad maintained that his country was the victim of an international conspiracy to instigate sectarian warfare in Syria and that the government was engaged in combating networks of armed insurgents rather than peaceful civilian protesters.

By September 2011 armed opposition groups had emerged and begun to stage increasingly effective attacks against Syrian forces. Attempts at international mediation by the Arab League and the United Nations failed to achieve a cease-fire, and by mid-2012 the crisis had evolved into a full-blown civil war. In July 2012 Assad’s inner circle suffered its most significant losses to date when several senior security officials were killed by a bomb inside a government building during a meeting. Among those killed were Daoud Rajiha, the minister of defense, and Assef Shawkat, Assad’s brother-in-law and one of his closest advisers.

With rebels and government troops seemingly locked in a bloody stalemate and security conditions deteriorating in Damascus, Assad’s public appearances became increasingly rare and consisted mainly of staged events to rally troops and civilian supporters. International allies of Assad’s regime and of the rebels each stepped up their support, raising the prospect of a regional proxy war. Efforts by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to fund and arm rebels became increasingly public in late 2012 and early 2013 while the Syrian government continued to receive weapons from Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. By late 2012 Hezbollah also had begun sending its own fighters into Syria to battle the rebels.

Assad faced new calls for international military action against his government after alleged chemical weapons attacks in the suburbs of Damascus killed hundreds on August 21, 2013. The Syrian opposition accused pro-Assad forces of having carried out the attacks, but Assad denied having used chemical weapons and asserted that, if such weapons had been used, rebel forces were to blame. U.S., British, and French leaders claimed to possess intelligence proving that Assad’s regime had ordered the attacks, and they made it known that they were considering retaliatory strikes. Russia, China, and Iran spoke out against military action, and Assad vowed to fight what he described as Western aggression. The threat of Western military intervention was averted in September when Russia, Syria, and the United States came to an agreement to place all of Syria’s chemical weapons under international control.

Assad’s tactics against the rebels continued to draw international condemnation even when his forces refrained from using chemical weapons. So-called “barrel bombs”—improvised explosives dropped from helicopters and airplanes—were routinely used to devastating effect against military and civilian targets in rebel-held areas even though human rights groups insisted that employment of such indiscriminate weapons constituted a war crime.

As the civil war dragged on, Assad’s hold on power, which had once seemed doubtful, appeared to grow stronger. The emergence of the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in eastern Syria and western Iraq in 2013 forced some of the countries that had called for Assad’s removal—including the United States—to refocus their efforts on defeating the new menace. Meanwhile, Russia, which had long provided weapons and political support to Assad, launched its own military action in Syria in 2015, bombarding rebel positions and deploying Russian ground troops in support of government forces. The intervention was largely successful: by the end of 2017, Assad’s dominance in most of Syria’s major cities had been reestablished, and the remaining rebels had been confined to a few isolated pockets of territory. By mid-2018 those pockets had been reduced to the region of Idlib, which Turkish forces had vowed to protect from the Syrian army. Assad initially avoided a confrontation in Idlib but advanced his forces in the spring of 2019 after an organization influenced by the ideology of al-Qaeda had become the dominant force in the region.

Meanwhile, as the conflict was dying down in most of the country, Assad began implementing policies to rebuild Syria. They included projects to build infrastructure and new commercial centres as well as efforts to attract foreign investors. One controversial measure, known as Law 10, allowed the government to seize property if its owners failed to reregister it. The purpose of the law was to allow the development or redistribution of property abandoned during the war by its owners. Many critics noted that the time limit for reclaiming property would disenfranchise many displaced Syrians, who simply could not return in time to reclaim their property, while enabling the government to expropriate property from its opponents en masse and give it to loyalists.